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Oliver Comins, 3 January, 2020
Oliver Comins read from three pamphlets and Oak Fish Island, his full
collection. He began with ‘The Visit’.
‘The day begins with the rustle of something
outside my window. You are there, in a drift
of old leaves, carrying your plan of action.
You wave a map and some keys: we are to head
out of town …’
The ‘you’ is of driving age, and possibly someone now dead (rustle, old leaves).
The moment was precious. There’s an exhilaration about the lines. Stanza 2
spotlights a formal garden. But the pair can only peer ‘through an iron gate’.
They don’t have access to its enticements. While they wait ‘for something to
happen’ two cirrus clouds ‘disrupt the blue’. We’re not quite in the heaven that
they anticipated. Maybe not even in reality.
There is no photograph that would have recorded the occasion, and the third
stanza doesn’t answer the mystery of this ‘truant day’. The poem might be an
elegy. It was a good starter. I enjoy poems that leave much to the reader to
interpret her or his own way.
Carol Ann Duffy commented that ‘Oliver Comins writes an affirmative, open
poetry which has its source emphatically in the writer’s life.’ This goes for most
of the work he read, covering a range of subjects from golf to place and its
people. D.A.Prince wrote of the whole collection that Comins…is writing about
what matters and what will survive.
**
‘Parks and gardens’ elicited a fine flurry of poems from the floor, only a couple
about the joy of plants themselves. Alice’s ‘The garden – where the sweet bulbs
bloom’ was one of them, endorsed with the hard fact that ‘nurture implies
choice’ and a snowdrop cultivar sells for £100. Evelyn’s untitled poem arrived
with splendid photographs of local trees surviving from a park that has lost it’s
mansion.
Both Sally Hammond’s ‘A seat for all seasons’ and Michael C’s ‘A Visit to my
Mother’ used flower or insect-filled landscapes to remind them of aged parents.
The former had a lovely break before the final stanza, ‘I reach out my hand //’If
you walk with me now’ / I say / ‘Under this rose arch …’. Michael’s had several
arguments. Memory and its unpredictable losses, the power of a poem to be
memorable and the limitations of divine power.
Both Maureen and Briony chose to remember a much-loved and celebrated
son/elder brother with flowers. Briony homed in on his last days. Maureen on
the kindness and spontaneity of a fellow mourner who delivered a bouquet
containing buried chocolates.
From Pippa we heard three poems penned for Finger Press over 30 years ago.
‘Seed Catalogue’, ‘In the Garden of the Night’, and ‘On leaving Stiffkey
forever’. A mixture of dreams, wit and melancholia.
Sally L’s ‘Marsh Garden’ was a perceptive homage to our Saltings and their
inhabitants. Peter’s ‘From A Manual For Walkers’ was a clever spoof on the
almost martial instructions one reads in Walking Tour Guides. His poem has a
strong musical element.
The prize for punning, has to go to John’s Wordsworthian ‘Death in the garden’.
I wandered lonely – I lost my pills
among the host of daffodils.
Without them I’d be very ill.
Oh how I hate the daffodil.
Carol Anne Duffy’s sonnet ‘Gardening’, and Billy Collins’ ‘Today’, were read
respectively by Helen and Carla. Neither poem uses a ‘poetic’ or a surplus
word, and this is harder than you imagine. The first has brilliant line-breaks; the
second, an inspired casualness throughout nine couplets. The poems are models
of their kind, and lessons in the importance of form.